Invisible Memories: Black Feminist Literature and Its Affective Flights (original) (raw)

"What Feels More Than Feeling?": Theorizing the Unthinkability of Black Affect

Contemporary critical theory is in the midst of the affective turn, which theorizes the centrality of “affect”—taken here broadly to mean social feeling and bodily intensity—to human sociality, intersubjective relationality, and the field of the political. This discursive formation has, to date, been deafeningly silent on the question of racial Blackness. This essay stages a dialogue between affect theory and theories of Black ontology, arguing that Black affect is unthinkable within the reigning onto-epistemological order of Western modernity. The singular position of Blackness throws the purported universality of affect as a mode of sociality into a fundamental crisis, revealing the thoroughly racialized nature of the extant discourse of affect theory. Through a close reading of Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric, the essay argues further that Black affect falls within the onto-epistemological closure of humanist discourse, positioning Black affective responses as legible only as signs of pathology. This leaves Blacks “trapped in a racial imaginary,” buried under the weight of antiblackness. Citizen theorizes this problematic through its sustained use of the second-person perspective as well as its deconstruction of lyric form. Through her persistent interrogation of the means by which racial violence negates Black interiority, and her exploration of the way it feels to live under constant erasure, Rankine provides a model for theorizing the unthinkability of Black affect. Ultimately, this essay underscores the necessity of theorizing affect from the position of Blackness in order to more fully grasp the persistence of the anti-Black paradigm.

Loving transgressions: Queer of color bodies, affective ties, transformative community

Journal of lesbian studies, 2017

This introductory article considers the importance of queer woman of color theorizations of affect in thinking more fully the recent interdisciplinary turn to affect. The affective turn has vitally invited culture and feminist critics to interrogate emotion beyond the individual to examine the political and cultural production of emotion. Even as women of color are often associated with excessive affect, the theoretical contributions women of color make to the field of affect studies are often overlooked. Our introduction and this special issue more broadly examine how this solipsism shapes projects invested in critical knowledge production, as well as the stakes of centering a queer woman of color genealogy. For instance, we argue for the importance of retaining U.S. third-world feminist concepts-like interpellation, oppositional consciousness, and the generative force of negative affects-even as they fall out of favor within affect studies. Centering theory that emerges from the v...

On Black Affective Forms: A Conversation with Garrett Bradley

October

In this conversation—recorded in 2019 for the artist's first solo museum exhibition—New Orleans–based Garrett Bradley discusses her filmic work as well as its relationship to institutional archives and personal communities with art historian Huey Copeland. What emerges is a critical account of Bradley's evolving Black feminist practice—its inspirations, antecedents, and analogues—which puts pressure on filmic conventions to move toward an “affective resymbolization” of America's racial imaginaries and the means through which they might be contested, shared, and visualized for audiences on all sides of the color line.

Intersectionality in Black Feminist Thought: Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a Case Study

2020

This paper explores black feminist thought, its interpretive framework, critical and epistemological modes of inquiry, and the political significance underlying its terrains of contestation in and outside academia. It emphasises the limitations of additive or mutually constitutive models of social divisions and thus privileges an intersectional approach that renders the complicated experience of black women within multiple categorizations of oppression understandable. By grounding intersectionality in a set of interlocking systems of social, cultural and political violence, this research explores black women’s politics of resistance to “epistemic violence” and institutionalized racism and sexism in Toni Morison‟s Beloved- an important work that captures one of the most significant junctures in African-American history, slavery and the Reconstruction era. This work offers an opportunity for understanding how intersectionality deepens notions of gender, race, and class and how they collaborate together in marginalizing the influence of black women on the social, cultural, and intellectual arenas. Revisiting the condition of black women through the lens of intersectionality suggests a desire to reconceptualize identity formation as inseparable from the external effects that determine black women’s realities.